I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don't hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can't make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. - Mark Twain writes about the telephone in the June 1880 Atlantic Magazine (via Kottke)
Because Artaud repeatedly proclaimed himself a poet and a madman, his practice — his singular performativity of ideas — has been easily incorporated into our histories of high modernism. But Weil — a young woman, clumsy, cerebral, thin, and poorly dressed — wrote no manifestoes. Consequently, her work remains as vulnerable in death as it was in life. Chris Kraus writes about Simone Weil for LA Review of Books
Kevin Kelly writes about Internet Archive's book preservation initiative, which includes a physical archive, We are in a special moment that will not last beyond the end of this century: Paper books are plentiful. They are cheap and everywhere, from airports to drug stores to libraries to bookstores to the shelves of millions of homes. There has never been a better time to be ...
YouTube for the remixing — users allowed to tag videos with a commercial reuse Creative Commons license. C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and other Creative Commons videos are available to use on YouTube Video Editor
How to livestream a tortoise.This is a serious question: Does a tortoise move fast enough that you need a 30 FPS camera? (Ask Metafilter)
I want to develop an image of the world, the real background, in order to be able to unfold my unreality before it,From Robert Musil’s Diaries, 1919 (Waggish)
One of the ways he initially dealt with the grief was playing as her character in Entropia, but Mindark has a one-person-one-avatar rule and he was asked to stop,Virtual world mourning, (Infocult)
Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard) on link rot: Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don't have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years.
In Brooklyn, check out the dozens of musicians playing free in a two day John Cage Musicircus performance at Roulette June 4th and 5th.
She was an Irish revolutionary and a writer, an occultist and a mother. She wore hats with birds’ wings on them. Of the couple, she had most of the charisma, and her letters and memoirs have become a favorite ...
I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.Leonora Carrington Is Dead at 94. (NYT)
On the misuse of Occam’s RazorThe important part of the sentence is not about simplicity, but about selecting a hypothesis. When you’re trying to figure out which explanation for something you’ve observed is correct, the best approach is to test the hypothesis that you can eliminate most quickly.
Ballet depends on the power of a woman’s body but rarely celebrates it. If anything, ballet encourages women to torture their bodies, rewarding their ability to be strong while appearing physically vulnerable. What choreographer Karole Armitage and her Armitage Gone! Dance company offer is not precisely a refutation of this rule, but its counterpoint.The Punk Ballerina (The Paris Review)
ASCIImeo takes Vimeo video and plays them as ASCII art. (via Kottke)
Simon Reynolds essay on Ariel Pink: What resulted seemed to be a semi-conscious attempt to recreate the primal scene of the child falling in love with pop for the first time with an ear cupped to an imperfectly-tuned transistor. This illusion was created ...
Notes from Duncan Malashock's talk at NURTUREart Gallery for the Soft Power show. Malashock explains his early computer art experiences with SuperPaint, NUDE.BAS, HyperCard, and Myst: The graphics were made with 3D software, but the interactive game itself was created using HyperCard. Imagine my encouragement when I found that out and took a look at the code for myself, since I admired the creators of the game for their ability to evoke a mood and tell a story with very few words or human characters
I have to ask myself what I expect from painting: should it be subservient to my ideas or a queen that I have to serve? - Neo Rauch in an interview with The Art Newspaper
Brazil no longer, as Julian Dibbell puts it, the "Great Southern Hope" for copyright reform. (compare and contrast with Dibbell's 2004 Wired story)
I found early on that I wasn't even watching the foreground dancers despite the very advanced and edgey dancing they are doing. When an artist has her audience transfixed by the background, she's truly gifted. (Fatova Mingus, This is Not Swan Lake on Marie Chouinard's Body Remix-Goldberg Variations)
Tumblrr, superimposes Tumblr images as a single image
It’s about time people started rendering unto Liquid Sky. Its long lipstick trace is smudged through much of indie cinema. The sights we see in Liquid Sky are riding the wave of genius punk sensibility from the late 70s, but by '83 are in full morph into the weird, technological forms we love. The broad bell-bottom analog curves of the 70's had given way to neon grids and skinny ties, and it was great. (Metafilter)
Gloria Sutton